MOSCOW — Russia and Ukraine are now at war. At least 2,200 people have died in the conflict; thousands more may die yet. The Western powers — America, Europe, NATO — now have no good options, but they cannot do nothing

“When they brought me to the cellar I saw three dead male bodies. One was in a sitting position by the wall. Two others were young, one lying on his stomach, the other on his back. Their throats were cut and they were naked. The blood from their throats was dripping into the sewage drains in the floor”

November 10, 2014
Timothy Snyder
As Russian military convoys continue the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has chosen to rehabilitate the alliance between Hitler and Stalin that began World War II. Speaking before an audience of Russian historians at the Museum of Modern Russian History, Putin said: “The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression agreement with Germany. They say, ‘Oh, how bad.’ But what is so bad about it, if the Soviet Union did not want to fight? What is so bad?”

9.1.2015
Marcus Bensmann, David Crawford
It’s one of the greatest war crimes of modern times – and the truth still hasn’t been told. On July 17th 2014 at about 16:20 local time, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. All 298 passengers died, including many children. Who fired the missile? Over several months the Berlin-based investigative newsroom CORRECT!V has gathered facts, investigated in eastern Ukraine and Russia, and found witnesses to the missile launch. The investigation unveiled a clear chain of evidence. MH17 was downed by a ground-launched BUK missile – launched by a unit of the 53rd Russian Air Defense Brigade from Kursk. The brigade unit, tasked with protecting Russian tank units, was operating in mid July on Ukrainian territory without displaying national emblems.

The Church prays for an end to the conflict in Ukraine.
KIEV, Ukraine — Since Ukrainian Christmas on Jan. 7, hellish scenes of cruel death have become routine in the eastern Donbass region on the Russian border.

In its 63-year long history, the European Union has seen many odd summits – but even against that background, 28 November 2013 in Vilnius must have stood out as something profoundly strange. The 28 leaders of the world’s largest economic bloc stood face to face with the man whom, by then, most of them had already come to despise: Viktor Yanukovych, the deceitful president of the corrupt and nearly bankrupt economy, Ukraine. In vain they begged him to sign an Association Agreement that would have given his impoverished country access to their lucrative market. He demanded billions in return and, when the money was not forthcoming, he refused to sign.

Summary: The Shoah in Ukraine had specific features that have branded and were branded by the millennial relations between Jews and Ukrainians. This long history bears great obstacles as well as great potentials to a shared narrative between the two people. I would like to assess them under three headings. 1) Thepervasive nature of lies and legends create a special difficulties for the recovery of such a shared narrative, difficulties which are far beyond the average pattern of divided memories. The memory of huge and tragic events is plagued by denial, censorshipand legends at a very deep and global level.

On March 10, 1946, at Lviv, the Orthodox Church of Russia, under pressure from the Soviet government, forcefully integrated the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and claimed jurisdiction over it. When the participants in the synod on March 8 and 9, voted for the “reunification” of their Church with the Patriarchate of Moscow, all the Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops were behind bars in prisons. The 216 priests and 19 laymen, assembled in the Cathedral of Saint George in Lviv by the NKVD, the ancestor of the KGB, were at the mercy of a “group of initiative” led by two Orthodox bishops, Antony Pelvetsky and Myhailo Melnyk, and an orthodox priest Gavril Kostelnyk.

Dear Mr. President,
Mr. Prime Minister,
Mr. Speaker,
Esteemed Members of the Knesset,
Ladies and gentlemen!
Shalom!
First of all I would like to thank you for the high honor of speaking in the Knesset—both the heart and the brain center of Israel's democracy. My sincere gratitude goes to the Israeli side—the President, the Prime Minister and personally to my good friend, Speaker Yuli Edelstein—for such an exceptional opportunity. I take it as a fact of high respect and esteem not…

“When they brought me to the cellar I saw three dead male bodies. One was in a sitting position by the wall. Two others were young, one lying on his stomach, the other on his back. Their throats were cut and they were naked. The blood from their throats was dripping into the sewage drains in the floor”

You must rush at Andrei Zvyaguintsev films if you have not seen them yet, notably The Banishment and Leviathan. Zvyaguintsev is a towering artist, the beauty and the expressive force of his pictures are constantly staggering. Although often mute and elliptical, difficult to articulate, they convey the clearest understanding, exactly like music. Take for instance, in Leviathan, the excavators demolishing the hero’s house, iron faced cold dinosaurs of injustice. Like all great art, it goes beyond a single explicit message (in Leviathan, it would be the corruption of local politicians and Courts) and offers a deeper human significance. Any interpretation is then partial compared to the thick meaning of his films.

October 12, 2015
Timothy Snyder
Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos
The Chernobyl nuclear power station, May 2008
It is right, but also not quite right, to celebrate the journalist and contemporary historian, Svetlana Alexievich, this year’s laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, as a Belarusian writer. The force of her work, the source of its power and plausibility, is the choice of a generation (her own) as a major subject and the close attention to its major inflection point, which was…

Constantin Sigov
«It isn’t obligatory to listen – there’s nothing but the music» – with this unpretentious joke the composer presents us his new discs. Release from the slightest shade of deliberateness helps us to remove the wrapper from this thin disc of real generosity. From what horn of plenty these marvelous gifts came? Maybe it is not obligatory but so desirably to hear and listen to them. The first sounds of the morning bagatelle return me to my forgotten night mood.…

Eighteen months ago, when Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, confusion prevailed in the West. Today, as Russia sends troops, armor, and aircraft to Syria, we are once again perplexed. On Monday President Vladimir Putin provided the explanation: Russia’s intervention is aimed to defeat ISIS and reduce the flow of refugees to Europe. A review of the last major Russian intervention, in Ukraine, might help us to evaluate this claim.

30.07.2015
Igor Solomadin
"We had no idea how people live in China," - confessed to me one of the participants of the left movement in Europe, which came out to protest against capitalism under the Maoist slogans in the late 1960s.
Maoism was then fashionable among the young and not so young (e.g., French philosopher Sartre) European intellectuals. At one time these people had done a lot to change Europe and the Western world in general for better with their passionate and relentless…

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Bernard-Henri Lévy (born 5 November 1948) is a French public intellectual and author. Often referred to today in France simply as BHL,[2] he was one of the leaders of the “Nouveaux Philosophes” (New Philosophers) movement in 1976. In 2010, The Jerusalem Post named Lévy 45th on a list of the world’s 50 most influential... more»

Galina Ackerman, Journalist Radio France Internationale, France.
From 1986 to 1988 was Editor in Chief of the French Edition of Continent. From 1988 she holds a weekly program at Radio France Internationale. From 1996 she also regularly contributes to the quarterly magazine Politique Internationale. In 2003 she was appointed as commissioner for... more»

Konstantin Sigov – Director of the Scientific Publishing Society “Duh i Litera” and the European Humanities Research Center of the National University “Kiev Mohyla Academy” and Chief Editor of the journal “Duh i Litera”. Born in Kiev 31 May 1962. In 1984 he completed studies at the Kiev Engineering- Building Institute. In 1986... more»

Ol’ga Aleksandrovna Sedakova was born in Moscow on December 26, 1949 to the family of a military engineer. She started school in Beijing, where her father was working at the time (1956-1957). Her family setting did not especially foster an interest in the humanities, and so from the very beginning teachers and friends played an extremely... more»